45 comments:

That fiction is dead is an assessment that's been around a while. It's not nearly as good anymore. Why? Has the talent fled to other fields, such as nonfiction? (Talking pre-Internet here) Is the internet just putting the final nail in? Is there nothing to write about? Writers of fiction can talk about their craft in such interesting and engaging ways. I knew a mother and son who were both writers. The mother wrote fiction, the son nonfiction. Their debates about autobiographical writing vs fiction were very interesting. Still, not such interesting fiction is actually being produced. Am I wrong?

Up until about three years ago, I almost exclusively read for information, not for pleasure. I made a deliberate effort to read fiction, interspersing the classics that my incompetent English teachers/professors failed to require. I would still rather read a dictionary or atlas than a novel (or anything by McCollough), but I have enjoyed some excellent fiction. I've also read a bunch of crap.

If something doesn't hold my interest past 40 pages, I'm done. I simply walk down the aisles of the library and pull out random books. If I like one, I read other stuff by the same author.

Fiction these days seems to be written with one eye on a movie deal. Classics developed the character, with the plot as a backdrop. Contemporary fiction seems to use the characters as the backdrop to the plot. Action is key.

Do those of you who reject fiction literature also reject fictional movies and television programs?

I used to read fiction almost exclusively, but now I rarely read it at all. I adore fictional movie though.

There's a time investment difference. If I watch a bad movie, I've usually spent about ninety minutes, and I've probably watched it with someone else, so that leads to discussion, and it's a social activity. If I read a bad book, the time spent is significantly longer, and the activity is solitary.

If I'm not going to know more about actual things by the end of the book, it has to be extremely good to warrant that investment.

Of Roth's work, I've only read Sabbath's Theater. I loved it. NB it's filthy-- an apotheosis of smut-- & potentially very offensive to some women (like that judge who would've refused him the prize, but not me).

You know, just because David McCullough takes a shit and prints it, doesn't mean it's Tacitus.

Reams of "history" are printed every year-- including a good number of bestsellers--which are forgetable crap. Even malarkey.

And spinning 'new' interpretations, yadda yadda, that have been the bread and butter of historians for generations. Like every time an Englishman writes a new book on Napoleon (the *definitive* volume, natch). Hint: he was just like *Hitler*!

Seldom do I hear anybody enthusing about dragging down the Plutarch off the shelf.

In all sobriety: most of this stuff is just Tom Brokaw Goes To Print. "Historians" endlessly aping the manners of television; all that Cecil B. DeMille pseudo-gravitas, that *uncleanliness* in the intellectual sense.

Even those hefty WWII tomes: Antony Beevor or "Absolute War". Fascinating stuff, yes. But tear it apart long enough and you ask-- does it really get to something new? Does it even model the real excellences that all writing-- that *history* writing-- should exemplify?

This chest-beating "I read some history the other day and it was great!" is a constant through many threads, and I feel the need to throw a conscientious satiric salvo against it. These books are fine to read for an evening, or whatever it takes to get through them.

But guess what: they don't *stay*. In fact, their arguments are as liable to fall apart as the plots of bad fiction.

I know the style well enough: that endless anecdotage; "now Truman ballsed up and said to him--"; "now here's another sob story of a Russian artist, this time in theatre, who also fell afoul of the NKVD . . ."

All true, perhaps. Part of our world. But this *preening* over reading it-- this silly lack of skepticism over the individual facts; this *facility* in yielding wholeheartedly to the latest new interpretation (ie whatever the Book Barn put out on the shelf/your daughter bought you for Father's Day/Tim Russert's 2nd cousin thrice removed went on tv and told you to read.

I'll fall back on "Absolute War" one more time: heavy, fascinating, couldn't have a more tragic subject matter, or an epic one.

But I rate it a dude. It takes up again and again the campaigns and makes them incomprehensible. It takes the tragic stories of many individuals and, time and again, has to tell us them, and makes of them an anecdotal sob story. Stalin didn't know the half of it: a million people's deaths,--each told individually-- that too, is a statistic.

Read fiction. We'll be smarter.

Anyway, there's Thucydides. Old men reading McCullough is like teenyboppers reading Libba Bray.

Gibbon, Macaulay and Frazier (The Golden Bough) are in the public domain and all beyond awesome. Mostly I read fiction though. The funny thing is that the fiction I read and enjoy is genre stuff that would be looked down upon by most of civil society. Recently I read Master of the Senate by Caro and Nixonland by Perlstein. Both are highly readable but I was a bit disappointed by Caro.

I've read most of Shakespeare's plays, mostly in school but some on my own, and I've read a lot of other important literature because I thought it important. Plus, I enjoyed it. But when I break out literary references, I usually feel like Dennis Miller on Monday Night Football.

Most people just don't care about literature, and I don't really blame them. There's not much money in being well-read.

I don't read any fiction either. I don't listen to much music and I never go to art galleries, either. I've been to the opera once in my life and fell asleep.

If the fine arts disappeared from the face of the earth, it would affect me not at all. The real world is far more interesting. Euler's Identity and the Maxwell Equations impart more truth and beauty than all the artists who ever lived.